Opened 12 years ago
Closed 9 years ago
#11943 closed defect (obsolete)
Low performance/hang and bloating with freash large dynamic VHD
Reported by: | TommyTom | Owned by: | |
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Component: | virtual disk | Version: | VirtualBox 4.2.16 |
Keywords: | VHD, bloat, dynamic, 2tB, Gentoo, emerge-webrsync | Cc: | |
Guest type: | Linux | Host type: | Windows |
Description
I created a new Gentoo VM using a new dynamic 2tB VHD file and everything seemed fine until I used emerge-webrsync and got hung up at "Syncing local tree..." (lot of HDD usage).
As a thread suggested, I rebooted the VM. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-3294217.html but it hung up again and again and once I tried to power it down to no avail and the process was still eating HDD cycles in the background (XBMC buffering even from a fast 3tb disk) and had to end the task. Strange as the actual throughput was very small (1mB/s, etc) and Win8 showed delays up to 30,000ms
I also noticed that with each retry, even if deleting the portage folder, it would still add to the VHD file size. After only a few retries (4-5?), I was pushing 37gB or more.
I eventually gave up and restarted the VM from scratch with native VDI format (should have done this in the first place... I thought VHD was universal, but it's just MS native format).
Dynamic 20gB VDI had no problems. HDD activity was MUCH higher (80mB/s versus like 20mB/s), a lot less spiking, and did not hang (finished in a few minutes) and the result was a 2gB VDI file (how the other got bloated to 37gB is beyond me, but guessing a VHD format bug or large dynamic bug).
Win8 x64 host Gentoo x64 guest 2tB dynamic VHD - NOT OK 20gB dynamic VDI - OK
Closing as obsolete, please reopen if this is still a problem with a recent VirtualBox release.
Btw. the performance with VHD images will be a lot less during the first write which will allocate a block because the VHD format is much more complex than VDI.